Fresh Girls, and Other Stories by Evelyn Lau
"Fresh Girls, and Other Stories" is a collection of short stories by Evelyn Lau that delves into the lives of young women navigating complex relationships and the challenging world of prostitution and alternative sexual lifestyles. The narratives are primarily told from the perspectives of these women, who often balance their identities between their work and their longing for love and acceptance. The protagonists grapple with the emotional toll of their experiences, revealing a desire for a conventional life while wrestling with the harsh realities of their chosen paths.
Lau's stories explore themes of self-identity, power dynamics, and the pain that arises from unfulfilled dreams and toxic relationships. Many characters confront their relationships with older, married men, highlighting the emotional scars inflicted by unreciprocated love. The collection is noted for its raw portrayal of the young women's inner struggles, often reflecting feelings of despair and self-hatred. Through her unflinching lens, Lau invites readers to empathize with these young women, challenging them to confront the complexities of their own lives. The collection ultimately serves as an exploration of vulnerability and the search for connection in a fragmented world.
On this Page
Fresh Girls, and Other Stories by Evelyn Lau
First published: 1993
The Work
Fresh Girls, and Other Stories, Evelyn Lau’s collection of short stories, centers around young women who seek love and human affection in a netherworld of prostitution and bizarre, alternative sexual lifestyles. Many of the stories’ protagonists live on two or more levels. They often wear a mask during the sex work they perform, but have retained a different identity in which they long for a more conventional life and for loving acceptance.
Lau’s stories are told from the perspective of the young women, who chase after a dream which continues to elude them. The reader is made to share, for example, the sadness of the drug-addicted teenage narrator of the title story. Looking around the massage parlor where she works, she suddenly recognizes that, although many of her friends still look nice in regular clothes and outside their work, they have lost that special youthful freshness after which their clients lust with such depravity.
The astonishing ease with which men and women cross from an arcane subculture of sadomasochism to a mainstream life that is officially unaware and innocent of the other world is described with brilliant sharpness in “The Session” and “Fetish Night.” Alternate identities are taken on quickly, and discarded just as easily, as young women agree to perform strange sexual acts on men who want to live out their secret fantasies and change from a position of power into that of helpless submission.
A core of stories explores the unhappy relationships of young women in love with older, married men who refuse to commit to their new lovers. In these stories, a man’s wedding band takes on the identity of a weapon “branding” the narrator’s skin. Fiercely subjective in her view, the protagonist of “Mercy” feels that “we are victims of each other,” as she sexually tortures her lover on his wife’s birthday.
The pain of the experience sometimes proves too much for the young women to bear. Out of a feeling of self-hatred and despair, “Glass” implies, a dejected girl cuts her wrists while she smashes her window, ready to follow the falling glass onto the street below. What gives artistic shape to Lau’s collection is her unflinching, sympathetic look at a world that is alien to most readers. Her young, often nameless narrators are allowed to speak for themselves and scrutinize their tortured identities. In Lau’s stories, the literary perspective is not that of a prurient voyeur who looks in but that of young souls who look out. Lau’s stories challenge readers to examine the abyss of their own lives.
Bibliography
Canadian Literature. Review of Fresh Girls, by Evelyn Lau. Summer, 1995, 147.
Hungry Mind Review. Review of Fresh Girls, by Evelyn Lau. Summer, 1995, 25.
Kirkus Review. Review of Fresh Girls, by Evelyn Lau. 63 (January 1, 1995): 13.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. Review of Fresh Girls, by Evelyn Lau. September 3, 1995, 6.